IV.—GREEN'S METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE.
By Arthur James Balfour, M.P.
There is a manifest objection to reviewing in detail a fragment of any work, and the objection is specially strong when the work is one which develops through its whole course a continuous argument. The folio wing paper there-fore, which is exclusively devoted to the consideration of the first hundred pages or so of the late Professor Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, requires, by way of introduction, a few words both of apology and explanation. The apology rests partly on the circumstance that Green himself published the "Metaphysics of Knowledge" in a detached form (Mind XXV.-VII.), and that, logically, it does not suffer from being separated from its ethical sequel. It rests partly on the great interest which attaches, even in its isolation, to this section of his work. Of this interest the primary source is, no doubt, the force and originality with which the author has developed and enforced ideas which are not perhaps in the fullest sense, original. But it is also due in no small measure to what has always seemed to me a singular phenomenon in philosophic literature.
Every one who has given even a cursory attention to the progress of speculation in Britain during the last few years must be aware how important is the reaction against the systems of empirical metaphysics which in the hands of Mill, Mr. Bain, and Mr. Spencer, reigned supreme not long since. Of this reaction the most numerous and energetic promoters may be described without unfairness as belonging to one school. It is not meant of course that they can in any way be made responsible for each other's opinions, or that they do not differ profoundly even on points of great importance. What is maintained is that they have sufficient general resemblance in their modes of dealing with philosophic problems to make it not unjust to class them together in the same way as, without reproach, we are allowed to class together thinkers who differ so widely as Mill and Mr. Spencer. The members of this school are bound together by the common conviction that the solution of the larger problems of philosophy is to be sought along the path which was opened out by Kant, and further explored by Kant's German successors. It is true that the most Kantian of recent transcendentalists would probably never have been
